How Allison Ellsworth Turned a Homemade Soda Into a Billion-Dollar Brand | The WSJ Money Interview

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:02]So, one of my biggest dreams post selling Poppy was to invest in fashion.

[00:00:09]What was your first big fashion splurge after the sale? Either purses or shoes.

[00:00:15]There's nothing you cannot beat without a Christian Louis Vuitton shoe. It's by far my favorite between that and Prada.

[00:00:22]And it about gave Steven a heart attack.

[00:00:25]And I said, "What is the point of having all this funny if we can't have fun with it?

[00:00:34]Allison Ellsworth went from working in the oil and gas industry to founding an apple cider vinegar drink, now known as Poppy. Last year, Ellsworth and her husband helped sell the company for nearly $2 billion to Pepsi. Now, she's invited us into her life in Austin, including to her new home before she's even moved in. We're talking about building wealth and what you actually do with it once you have it.

[00:00:59]I am so excited to sit down with you.

[00:01:02]Tell me about how you knew it was time to go allin on beverages. I remember the first time we realized we had a business. We were at a farmers market.

[00:01:11]We had just bought a house. I was 3 months pregnant with my first kid and I said, "We need to go all in." My husband told me I was absolutely crazy, but he trusted the vision. So, we maxed out our credit cards, sold one of our cars to buy bottles, opened our own manufacturing facility. I think we invested about $90,000 into the business year one.

[00:01:33]>> Was your husband Steven working at the time? What was he up to?

[00:01:37]>> You know, it's an interesting position that we were in because we had just bought a house. We wanted to provide for our family and like lots of entrepreneurs, you're almost working two jobs. So, he was working I think he tried to be a waiter for a week. That didn't work out. So he reached out to some oil and gas contacts and he was able to map and work on nights and weekends to pay the mortgage. We would then work during the week and uh on the weekends for farmers market to be able to buy groceries. But every little bit that we had, we would reinvest into the business to where in about 18 months we did about 500,000 in revenue.

[00:02:14]>> Fast forward a little bit, you end up on Shark Tank and you're 9 months pregnant.

[00:02:24]Hi Sharks. I'm Allison Ellsworth.

[00:02:26]>> What was that like?

[00:02:27]>> I made a decision really early on with Steven that we were going to have a family and we were going to have a successful business. And absolutely was it harder? It was way harder. But that's what we had signed up for. And I wasn't willing to sacrifice on both. So, when the chance came to be on Shark Tank, they kept telling me the date and it kept getting pushed and I was like, I'm about to have this baby, I went anyways because one, I my doctor cleared it. I was very healthy, very safe. And two, I was living my dream and I didn't have to pick. I kept telling myself like, you can't go in labor and it actually kept me in a really like zen state of mind whereas my husband was sweating profusely, pacing back and forth like a total mess. I'm out.

[00:03:11]>> I'm out.

[00:03:12]>> I'm out.

[00:03:13]>> I'm out.

[00:03:14]>> I'm going to give you an offer.

[00:03:16]>> Whoa, kitty.

[00:03:17]>> Going to give you an offer.

[00:03:19]>> Had the baby about 10 days after we were on and ended up securing a deal and a healthy baby boy.

[00:03:25]>> Rohan owes a people call him a grandfather. I believe he takes a 25% stake in your company. What happens next?

[00:03:33]>> Nobody just closes a deal week after getting a deal on Shark Tank. So, it's like any other regular business. you go into due diligence. So, we did a a DD over like six months and we ended up closing our deal with Rohan the night before our episode aired, but I remember the first thing he said to me was, "You have an incredible founder story. You have an incredible tasting liquid, but your branding is crap." And we ended up working on a rebrand over 9 months. So, we looked at who are we going after? Who is our consumer? We wanted to revolutionize soda for the next generation. So, we were in a glass bottle. Well, we had to be in a 12 oz can. And then it came down to changing the name. That was probably one of the hardest things to do. And then finally, we landed on Poppy, which is a playoff soda pop. What was it like being in due diligence on your business? You're getting peppered with questions from bankers, lawyers. You've just had this huge deal go through and yet you have a newborn. Once again, I think you're going to see this theme of me just doing what it takes to be successful. I remember with my first I was on the bottling line, went into labor, took three Zooms from the hospital talking through with suppliers, and I was back on the filling line with the baby strapped to me 2 weeks later. I want to drill a little bit deeper here because when I talk to women who've just given birth, they are exhausted. They are in pain. They're feeling a lot of things.

[00:05:04]So, walk me through what it's like getting on a Zoom two hours after you give birth.

[00:05:09]>> I think absolutely. I had the night sweats and you're exhausted and you feel crazy, but I had a good support system.

[00:05:16]My mom helped raise our kids. My husband was very supportive. I trusted the team to be there when I couldn't be there.

[00:05:23]And I set a good example. I took off when I needed to take off or I said I was exhausted when I needed to be exhausted. And for me, I think it's okay to work hard. I think it's okay to live in chaos and to like it. I think that can be controversial. A lot of people work about work life balance. I think if you want to be successful, you kind of have to sacrifice that for a little bit.

[00:05:44]>> I love that. Walk me through 24 hours in Allison's life during this period when when you had just given birth.

[00:05:51]>> I'm trying to get coffee. I'm probably not having breakfast myself. off to school or daycare immediately on Zoom by 8:00 a.m. Hopefully, I had time to shower and put on makeup depending on the day. I didn't get a babysitter really cuz my mom was really helpful in the early years with helping raise our kids. And so, she was there. She'd bring the baby. I'd breastfeed on Zoom. She'd go put him down for a nap. We couldn't pay her. So, she moved in with us to just help get us through. I was talking to a founder the other day and he goes, "Yeah, I shut my computer at 5. I cold punched I sauna." And I said, "Oh my gosh, when was your exit?" He goes, "I haven't." And I said, "Exactly." Because you're not focusing on the business. And he was like, "Oh, wow. Wait, you're right." You and Steven co-founded this business. Were there ever moments where you butt heads with the other people in the room?

[00:06:42]>> Oh, absolutely. I think that I'm a I'm a lot to take and most entrepreneurs don't start a company for people to tell them what to do, right? You think you know everything. And I'm here to tell you that is not how you should operate a business. And I had to learn that the hard way, not letting my ego get in the way of growth of the business. And so I thought I knew everything. I thought that my way was the highway. And so I had to learn to partner and collaborate, right? And then on the flip side, I wanted to do things that no one had ever done before. before and they were like, "Whoa, whoa, that's not how we've done it before." We launched Poppy March 2020, the first week of co every traditional way of marketing had gone out the window. We needed to think differently. How do we talk to our consumer with everybody stuck at home?

[00:07:27]And so, no brands were on TikTok at the time. I said, "We have to get on TikTok." And they told me, everyone told me I was crazy. And I said, "We have to do this." And I ended up making taco recipe videos. I danced. I did all the wild trends until one day I sat down and I told my story of why I started the business. I didn't feel very good and I started drinking apple cider vinegar every single day and it made me feel incredible but I hated the taste of straight vinegar and it changed the entire trajectory of the business at Poppy.

[00:08:01]>> What made you get on TikTok that day?

[00:08:04]because I I feel like there's a pattern of you making kind of bold decisions >> for me and the way I feel is I would have done anything to be not only successful but to share Poppy with as many people as possible. And if that meant making a fool of myself online to break into this wild wild west of the for you page to talk to people in their homes that everybody was on this platform that no one could figure out.

[00:08:30]Like why would I not? Something that I think is really important is embarrassment is the most underexplored emotion when it comes to success and how you have to be willing to go out there and make a fool of yourself if you want to have any kind of success in life.

[00:08:43]>> When was your first inkling that hey, we could we could sell. We could have an exit. You know, when we first started Poppy, we were building it to be a generational brand, but we knew we had to sell, which could be controversial in saying we built a company to sell it.

[00:08:58]But the thing is, Pepsi has incredible distribution. We were never able to be in like the Starbucks of the world, sports stadiums, music venues, all of those were off limits. And so now we were able to have a distribution partner to go everywhere. So, we knew that day one that someday you have to have some kind of exit because if you go IPO, you don't have that distribution arm backing you and you're still kind of doing it on your own and there's only so big you can grow. It was very emotional though going through that understanding, okay, this could happen. You want to partner with someone that's not going to quote unquote what they always say, kill the brand, but also change everybody's lives at Poppy. every we we gave equity to 99.99% of employees. We made like 44 people millionaires. I had people crying to me saying that they'd bought their house for their, you know, that they could grow up and they bought cars, they paid off their student loans, right? We changed so many people's lives. So, it's just, it comes down to emotion. It's such a bigger impact. And then the distribution piece. So, it's interesting. Pepsi actually offered us an offer a year earlier that we were just like, it wasn't quite right. the stars weren't quite aligning. And then a year later, they came back and they offered us the the $ 1.95 billion.

[00:10:18]I think they offered it on a Sunday. We said yes by Tuesday. We went through due diligence 6 weeks later and signed the paperwork.

[00:10:24]>> Where were you when you heard about that 1.95 billion number?

[00:10:29]>> Okay. I remember I was in the car with my husband. We're going back and forth if we should negotiate or how we should go up on it and we all just were like, "This is a really good offer. we don't want to like slap them in the face and come back and like really play hard ball cuz we really wanted to just like have this be a good partnership. And so I remember everyone just kind of agreed on the board and we went back and said yes.

[00:10:51]>> So there's a period of time after you say yes to the deal, you do the paperwork and then there's a day when the money hits your bank account. Tell me about that day.

[00:11:00]>> I remember refreshing all day and then like my money hit first which was so fun. And I was like, "Hoohoo, I'm richer than you." And then he kept refreshing and then like 2 hours later his hit. And we wanted to celebrate so bad, but at the end of the day, we still had a crazy schedule of calls. We were still running a business. You don't just like sell it, get the money, and then go on vacation, right? And so we ended up getting in a huge fight. Like, you didn't make time for that. And the next day we woke up, we're like, "That was dumb. Let's go to a yoga class. Let's go to lunch. And then we got back to work. People think that you have this big exit. You have this huge amount of money that hits you and that your life is just different the next day. At the end of this day, we were still in the same house, same car, same schools, same everything. The difference is is we had spent so much time setting us up for success for that day, which I think a lot of people don't do. And so when it happened, we had our financial advisors and wealth advisors in place and we started doing that planning really early on. So it's a balance that we're kind of learning together at the same time.